Age of the omnibus: Mike Harris's Bully Bill was passed 20 years ago

Bill 26 was called a threat to democracy — one MPP stayed in the house overnight in protest — but Trudeau promises the era of gargantuan bills is over

Twenty years ago today, the Ontario government of Mike Harris set the stage for the birth of both a Queen’s Park legend and a troubling political tactic — one that new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promises is dead.

Out of the blue, Harris’s hard-right government was elected in June 1995. It intended to cut deep and hard. And it wanted to do it fast, with the least possible uproar and resistance.

On Nov. 29, 1995, while Queen’s Park media were locked away poring over the new government’s fall economic statement, an unprecedented bill was tabled in the legislature.

It was Bill 26. Its short title was the Savings and Restructurings Act. It was massive and far-ranging — more than 200 pages long, amending dozens of existing laws, containing dramatic changes to health care and municipal services while granting arbitrary new powers to cabinet ministers. It would become known as the Bully Bill.

The government said it wanted the beast — so complex it left even government ministers sputtering as they tried to explain it — passed within two weeks, before the legislature’s Christmas break. It didn’t get that wish.

A few days later, the legislature became the scene of a bizarre standoff in which a Liberal MPP refused to give up his seat, spending the night in the house, urinating in a bottle beneath a blanket — the sergeant-at-arms unwilling to manhandle Ontario’s only black member out of the place and render him a sort of latter-day Rosa Parks.

Alvin Curling (who would later become speaker himself, and a diplomat to the Dominican Republic) had refused to vote on a routine motion. The Speaker, as rules required, ordered him from the chamber.

When the sergeant-at-arms reached Curling’s seat to escort him out, other opposition MPPs linked arms to surround him. And the standoff was on, ending only the next day with a compromise to hold public hearings on the bill.

At those hearings, Ganga Rajballie of the Christian Reform Church told that committee that Bill 26 — as many have since agreed — fundamentally offended “the democratic processes for decision-making within our society.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, several influential Harris MPPs at the time — future federal cabinet ministers John Baird, Jim Flaherty, Tony Clement, along with backroom strategist Guy Giorno — would go on to work for former prime minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa after he took office in 2006. And Harper would frequently use omnibus legislation of Brobdingnagian scale.

The Harper government introduced omnibus budget and crime bills of 300-800 pages, larded with unrelated matters that seemed patently designed to defeat parliament’s oversight role.

Maclean’s has reported that the budgets tabled between 1994 and 2005 averaged 74 pages; budgets tabled by Harper’s government between 2006-2011 averaged 309.

The Library of Parliament has said in a research paper that the legitimacy of omnibus bills “appears to have been first questioned (in the Commons) in 1953” when a proposed bill affected three existing acts.

Among the more controversial since then were Pierre Trudeau’s justice reforms of 1968, National Energy Program provisions of 1982, and Brian Mulroney’s Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement legislation of 1988.

Historically, parliamentary procedure required that each bill deal with a single theme. Early omnibus bills tended to be a collection of mere housekeeping measures in which no substantial policy change was contained.

Limiting legislation to a single principle or purpose that ties together all the proposed enactments “renders the bill intelligible for parliamentary purposes,” the late Liberal MP Herb Gray once put it.

Intentional unintelligibility — the loading of one bill with multiple unrelated purposes as a way to speed passage and evade debate and scrutiny — seems a fairly recent phenomenon touched off by the Harris government 20 years ago and much admired by Harper.

In his campaign platform, Justin Trudeau said his predecessor had “used omnibus bills to prevent Parliament from properly reviewing and debating his proposals.

“We will change the House of Commons standing orders to bring an end to this undemocratic practice.”

You might say that, 20 years on, the battle of Alvin Curling’s bladder vs. the Bully Bill has been won.